$100T is managed by “human duct tape” | E2308

July 6, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

When $100 Trillion Runs on Human Duct Tape

Chris Holonzic, CEO of Hanover Park, walked into a room full of investors in 2024 and told them B2B SaaS was dead. They laughed at him. He wanted to build financial infrastructure for the world's most complex investment firms, and he had never done it before. But the problem he identified was staggering: roughly $100 trillion in global assets is managed by what he calls "human duct tape"—legacy services businesses where accountants in Kentucky run the entire backbone on QuickBooks, Bill.com, and Excel. Fund managers have to email their own service providers to request access to their own data. "That's insane in 2026," Holonzic says.

The data hostage problem

The core dysfunction Holonzic describes is that fund administrators traditionally act as service providers with a perverse incentive. They buy access to QuickBooks for their clients but don't give those clients access to it. When a CFO needs data to prepare for fundraising or a new report, they have to email their own administrator and ask for it. "You're stuck with a bunch of human middlemen that are holding your own data hostage," Holonzic says.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **The "Human Duct Tape" Problem** - Chris Holonzic describes how $100T in global assets is managed by legacy services firms using QuickBooks, Excel, and human middlemen, with fund managers unable to access their own data without emailing their fund admin.
2 (03:44) **Why Funds Outsource to "Someone Who Hates You"** - Explains the historical rationale: LPs only cared about quarterly financial reports, so CFOs didn't mind the opaque, slow process.
3 (04:17) **The Hanover Park Stack: ERP + AI Agents** - Chris describes the contrarian bet: building an AI-native services company, not just another SaaS tool.
4 (05:42) **Why Fund Accounting is Complex** - Explains the difficulty: funds like Blackstone have hundreds of legal entities with different profit/loss allocations and unique terms from limited partnership agreements.
5 (07:10) **From PDFs to Rules: The Ontology Problem** - Chris explains how Hanover Park uses "long horizon agents" to ingest hundreds of thousands of documents and map the fund's ontology (the way it structures relationships between LPs, portfolio companies, and legal entities).
6 (09:35) **The "One-Click Migration" Reality** - Describes the massive technical challenge of migrating 25 years of data for $20B in assets.
7 (12:41) **AI Model Progress: From Laughable to Viable** - Chris reveals that the "one-click migration" was a joke 12 months ago, but became possible 3-6 months ago with Claude Opus 4-6.

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Show Notes

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Today’s show:

*There are $100 trillion in global assets sitting on top of what Hanover Park co-founder/CEO Chris Hladczuk calls “human duct tape”: armies of accountants in offices patching together work from various legacy tools (QuickBooks, Excel) that are holding funds’ own data hostage. Can all of this be replaced with AI? Find out how their startup went from overseeing $1B to $20B in assets in just 15 months.

PLUS, we flash back to March 2020, when Jason and Figma co-founder/CEO Dylan Field broke down the design tool’s initial go-to-market strategy, made some WILDLY inaccurate COVID predictions, and considered anxiety about “SaaS burnout” years before the category went full apocalyptic.

Guests:

Chris Hladczuk on X: https://x.com/chrishlad

Hanover Park: https://www.hanoverpark.com/

Dylan Field: https://x.com/zoink

Figma: https://www.figma.com/

Relevant Links:

Turner Novak on X: https://x.com/TurnerNovak

Banana Capital: https://www.bananacapital.vc/

Emergence Capital: https://www.emcap.com/

Lux Capital: https://www.luxcapital.com/

Susa Ventures: https://susaventures.com/

Bill.com: https://www.bill.com/